The Fundamental Imposition
Human existence begins with an act of cosmic injustice. We are brought into being without our consent by individuals acting on biological imperatives they neither fully understand nor control. Our parents, driven by evolutionary programming disguised as love, desire, or social expectation, make a unilateral decision that commits us to decades of consciousness, struggle, and eventual death. This is not a gift but an imposition—life as hassle rather than opportunity.
The impossibility of obtaining consent from pre-conscious entities is precisely the ethical problem: we create conscious beings who will inevitably develop preferences, desires, and the capacity for suffering without being able to consult those future preferences. The asymmetry is fundamental—those who make the decision to create life bear none of its consequences, while those who bear the consequences had no voice in the decision. This represents a unique form of temporal injustice that other ethical frameworks struggle to address.
Traditional philosophy has long grappled with the question of why we exist, but rarely confronts the more pointed question of whether we should have been made to exist at all. While anti-natalist philosophers have begun to address this question, they typically focus on preventing future births rather than addressing what those already alive should do with their unwanted existence.
The biological imperative that produces new humans operates independently of any consideration for the welfare of those humans. Evolution selects for reproduction, not happiness, meaning, or consent. We are the products of a blind process that creates conscious beings capable of suffering without consulting them about their preferences.
This reality forms the cornerstone of what I propose to call existential minimalism: a philosophical framework that begins with the recognition of existence as an unwanted imposition and proceeds to develop rational strategies for managing this predicament.
The Problem with Traditional Responses
When confronted with life’s involuntary nature, most philosophical traditions offer responses that compound rather than alleviate the original imposition. Rather than acknowledging the fundamental problem—that we never consented to exist—these approaches demand additional engagement with existence itself.
Existentialism, as exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, demands that we create meaning from meaninglessness, essentially asking us to work harder at the very thing we never asked for. The absurdists, following Albert Camus, suggest we embrace the contradiction with rebellious joy—again, requiring additional emotional labour. Religious frameworks promise eventual compensation for present suffering, but still insist we actively participate in systems we never chose. Even nihilism, while recognizing the absence of inherent meaning, often wallows in despair or embraces destruction, both of which require considerable energy expenditure.
These approaches share a common flaw: they assume engagement is mandatory and that some form of active response to existence is required. Existential minimalism rejects this assumption entirely, proposing instead strategic disengagement as the most rational response to unwanted existence.
The widespread acceptance of life as meaningful or worthwhile often requires significant psychological and social conditioning that obscures the fundamental asymmetry of our situation. We are taught from birth to be grateful for existence, to find purpose and meaning, and to contribute to the continuation of the cycle—all without ever being asked whether we wanted to participate in the first place.
The Principle of Energy Conservation
Existential minimalism proposes a different approach: if life is an unwanted imposition, the rational response is to minimize the energy required to manage it. This is not depression, which involves significant psychological suffering and often requires substantial effort to maintain. Nor is it suicide, which merely exchanges one form of energy expenditure for another and carries its own set of complications and potential consequences for others.
Instead, existential minimalism advocates for what might be called “existential hibernation”—a practical application of the core principle that involves strategic minimal engagement designed to reduce the friction of unwanted existence while avoiding the additional complications that come from either total withdrawal or enthusiastic participation.
The guiding principle operates on two levels: as a pragmatic strategy for reducing daily friction, and as an ethical framework that minimizes harm to oneself and others. Since we cannot undo the original imposition of existence, the most responsible approach is to manage it with maximum efficiency and minimum waste—of energy, resources, and impact on others who find themselves in the same unwanted predicament.
This ethical framework prioritizes harm reduction over positive outcomes, aligning with negative utilitarian principles that focus on minimizing suffering rather than maximizing happiness. However, it differs from traditional negative utilitarianism by emphasizing individual energy conservation rather than collective welfare maximization.
Practical Implementation: The Urban Hermitage
Pure withdrawal from society is neither possible nor desirable, as it typically requires more energy than selective engagement. Complete isolation leads to problems with basic needs, healthcare, legal compliance, and social intervention from concerned parties. The goal is not maximum withdrawal but optimal withdrawal—finding the minimum viable participation that keeps external systems satisfied while preserving maximum personal autonomy.
The urban hermitage represents the practical implementation of existential minimalist principles—a lifestyle configuration that applies the core philosophy to daily existence:
Economic Minimalism: Remote work eliminates commuting, office politics, and forced social interaction while providing the income necessary to maintain independence. The goal is not career advancement or professional fulfilment, but simply earning enough to avoid financial pressures that would require additional engagement.
Social Minimalism: Human relationships, while occasionally pleasant, are fundamentally unpredictable and energy-intensive. They require emotional labour, schedule coordination, reciprocal obligations, and constant negotiation. Most social benefits can be obtained through books, which provide access to interesting minds without the maintenance requirements of living relationships.
Consumption Minimalism: Basic needs can be met with remarkable efficiency. Grocery delivery or brief shopping trips handle nutrition. Digital entertainment eliminates the need for social venues. Simple living spaces require minimal maintenance. The goal is not ascetic purity but practical efficiency.
Stimulation Minimalism: The human brain requires some form of engagement to prevent the discomfort of boredom, but this can be satisfied through solitary activities that align with one’s particular neurological configuration. Reading, writing, creative work, or any other mentally engaging pursuit serves this function without requiring external validation or social participation.
The Role of Creative Output
Many individuals who adopt this approach find themselves producing creative work—writing, art, music, or other forms of expression. This might seem to contradict the principle of minimal engagement, but it actually supports it in several ways.
First, creative activity functions as mental maintenance, providing the stimulation necessary to prevent psychological discomfort while requiring no external participation. It is a form of internal dialogue that keeps the mind occupied without creating social obligations.
Second, creative work often emerges naturally from particular neurological configurations. Some brains produce poems or stories the way others produce anxiety or repetitive thoughts. Attempting to suppress this natural output would require more energy than simply allowing it to occur.
Third, the value or reception of creative work is irrelevant to its function within existential minimalism. Whether anyone reads the poems, views the art, or listens to the music has no bearing on its utility as mental occupation. The work serves its purpose simply by existing, not by achieving recognition or influence.
This explains why someone following this approach might publish their work online despite minimal readership. The act of publication requires little additional effort while satisfying whatever residual social impulses remain, but the lack of audience neither surprises nor disappoints. The work was never intended to change the world or achieve immortality—it was simply what the brain did while passing time.
Digital Impermanence and the Literary Will
Traditional approaches to legacy reflect an anxiety about mortality that existential minimalism considers misplaced. The desire to be remembered, to leave a lasting impact, to achieve some form of immortality through work or relationships—these represent additional forms of energy expenditure that serve no practical purpose for the individual who will not exist to appreciate them.
Digital platforms offer an elegant solution to this problem. By creating work in electronic formats hosted by third parties, someone practising this philosophy avoids the decision-making burden of legacy management. When the individual dies, the hosting fees go unpaid, and the work disappears naturally. No relatives need decide what to preserve, no estates need management, no publishers need to be contacted. The work simply fades away along with its creator.
For those who adopt this approach and wish to handle the unlikely possibility that someone might want access to their work after their death, a Creative Commons declaration serves as a minimal-effort solution. It costs nothing to implement and removes legal barriers for anyone who might encounter the work through archived formats, but it requires no active management or decision-making by others.
This approach to creative legacy embodies existential minimalist principles: acknowledge the most probable outcome (disappearance), prepare for unlikely alternatives with minimal effort (open licensing), but avoid investing emotional energy in outcomes you will not be present to experience.
Distinguishing from Related Philosophies
Existential minimalism differs from several superficially similar approaches:
Depression: While both involve withdrawal from social engagement, depression typically includes significant psychological suffering, negative self-judgment, and impaired functioning. Existential minimalism is a strategic choice made from a position of clarity about life’s nature, not a symptom of psychological dysfunction.
Traditional Asceticism: Religious and philosophical traditions of withdrawal—from Buddhist monasticism to Christian hermitage to the philosophical retreat advocated by Epictetus and other Stoics—typically aim toward spiritual enlightenment, moral purification, or transcendent understanding. Existential minimalism seeks none of these goals—it is purely practical, aimed at reducing friction rather than achieving higher states.
Nihilistic Destruction: While nihilism recognizes the absence of inherent meaning, it often manifests as destructive behaviour toward self or others. Friedrich Nietzsche, though often misunderstood as advocating nihilism, actually warned against its destructive potential. Existential minimalism is constructive in its approach, seeking to minimize harm rather than maximize it.
Hedonistic Withdrawal: Some forms of disengagement focus on maximizing pleasure through drugs, entertainment, or other forms of stimulation. This approach is ultimately futile, as even the greatest pleasures fade and require increasingly intense stimulation to maintain the same effect. Those who pursue this path typically either destroy themselves physically and emotionally through escalation, or fall into depression when the diminishing returns become undeniable. Existential minimalism avoids this trap by neither pursuing pleasure actively nor depending on it for psychological stability, recognizing that pleasure-seeking often requires energy expenditure that defeats the purpose of minimal engagement.
Ethical Framework and Its Limits
The ethical framework of existential minimalism centres on energy efficiency and harm minimization, but this raises important questions about its practical limits and potential contradictions. When does minimizing one’s own energy expenditure conflict with minimizing harm to others?
The framework addresses this tension through a principle of proportional responsibility: since we are all unwilling participants in the same imposed existence, we owe each other basic consideration but not self-sacrifice. The goal is to minimize aggregate friction while avoiding actions that would force others into higher-energy responses.
For example, maintaining minimal social courtesies and legal compliance prevents others from having to deal with the consequences of our complete withdrawal, which would increase their energy expenditure. Conversely, we are not obligated to engage in emotional labour or social performance that others might prefer but which requires significant energy from us.
This creates a kind of “social efficiency equilibrium” where everyone’s energy expenditure is minimized through predictable, low-maintenance interactions rather than through one person bearing the cost of another’s complete disengagement.
The framework acknowledges that different individuals will have different baseline energy requirements and different tolerance for various forms of engagement. What matters is not achieving identical lifestyles but rather each person finding their own optimal balance point between energy conservation and social friction avoidance.
Philosophical Implications
Existential minimalism suggests several broader philosophical insights:
Consent and Temporal Justice: The involuntary nature of existence raises questions about the ethics of reproduction that most philosophical traditions avoid confronting directly. Anti-natalists like David Benatar and Thomas Metzinger have addressed this directly, arguing that bringing new conscious beings into existence is ethically problematic due to the inevitable suffering it entails. Existential minimalism extends this insight by recognizing that the inability to obtain meaningful consent from potential future consciousness represents a fundamental form of temporal injustice—those making reproductive decisions bear none of the consequences while imposing all of them on others. While anti-natalism focuses primarily on preventing future births, existential minimalism addresses the complementary question of how those already alive should manage their unwanted existence.
Energy as Ethical Framework: Rather than evaluating actions based on duty, consequences, or virtue, existential minimalism evaluates them based on energy efficiency relative to unavoidable requirements. This provides both a practical metric for decision-making and an ethical stance: since we are all trapped in the same unwanted predicament, the most responsible approach is to minimize the harm we cause to ourselves and others through inefficient engagement with systems we never chose to join.
Counter-Existentialism: While traditional existentialists like Camus and Sartre argued we are “condemned to be free” and thus have a duty to create meaning and live authentically, existential minimalism represents a form of counter-existentialism. It accepts the premise of a meaningless, absurd universe but draws the opposite conclusion—one of strategic withdrawal rather than defiant engagement. If we are unconsenting participants in existence, our primary obligation is not to create meaning but to minimize the energy required to manage our unwanted participation.
Temporal Perspective: Most philosophies assume that life extends far enough into the future to justify long-term projects, relationship-building, or meaning-creation. Existential minimalism maintains a shorter temporal focus, planning only as far ahead as necessary to maintain basic functioning while avoiding investments in outcomes that require sustained engagement over extended periods.
Social Contract Revision: The social contract assumes willing participation in collective endeavours. Existential minimalism suggests that minimal compliance with social requirements, rather than enthusiastic participation, represents a more honest relationship with systems we never chose to join.
Conclusion: The Ethics of Minimal Harm
Existential minimalism is not a philosophy of despair but of practical wisdom. It acknowledges that since we cannot undo the imposition of existence, we can at least manage it efficiently. By reducing our energy expenditure to the minimum necessary for basic functioning, we honour the reality that we never asked to be here while avoiding the additional suffering that comes from either fighting this reality or pretending to embrace it enthusiastically.
This approach may seem cold or nihilistic to those who have convinced themselves that life is inherently meaningful, but it offers something valuable: honesty about the human condition and a practical framework for managing unwanted existence without causing additional harm to ourselves or others. It recognizes that many people do find life worthwhile, but argues that this often requires significant psychological and social conditioning to overlook the fundamental asymmetry of our situation.
The existential minimalist neither advocates for nor condemns existence—it simply manages the situation with maximal efficiency and minimal waste. In a universe that imposed consciousness upon us without our permission, this may be the most ethical response available: to live quietly, consume little, create what emerges naturally, and leave behind as small a footprint as possible.
Perhaps this is not the philosophy the world wants, but it may be the philosophy the world deserves—one that acknowledges the fundamental unwanted nature of the human predicament while providing a workable strategy for those who find themselves, through no choice of their own, alive.
Author’s Note
This essay originated from personal experience of practising the lifestyle and philosophical approach described herein. The urban hermitage lifestyle, the approach to creative work as neurological by-product, and the strategies for optimal disengagement reflect lived experience rather than purely theoretical speculation.
The systematic presentation and philosophical framework were developed through collaborative dialogue with Claude AI, which assisted in organizing ideas into coherent essay form, providing scholarly context, and identifying connections to existing philosophical traditions. While the AI helped structure the argument and situate it within broader philosophical discourse, the core insights about energy conservation as ethical framework, strategic disengagement, and existence as unwanted imposition represent personal conclusions drawn from practical implementation.
This essay offers one philosophical response to the human predicament—not as universal prescription, but as a coherent framework for those who find themselves similarly positioned toward existence. It represents a serious attempt to articulate a workable philosophy for managing life when traditional approaches to meaning, purpose, and engagement prove unsatisfactory or energy-intensive.
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